Month: January 2008
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Experts: Bad at prediction
The Hotline reminds its audience of bloviating insiders that no one knows what’s going to happen in the presidential race: Before we fall into the same trap of trying to crystal ball WH’08, we offer a quick nod to NH Dems, who stuck it to the pundit class 1/8 by doing the wildly unexpected. This
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Fred Thompson is a “wild card”?
Huh? The voting in New Hampshire did little to clarify the muddied Republican field. The McCain, Romney and Huckabee campaigns are all girding for battle, and some political analysts still see Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee as a wild card in Southern primaries. At this point, isn’t Fred Thompson a “wild card” only in the
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What went wrong in NH?
Recriminations — and speculation — have already begun in the wake of Hillary’s unexpected win in New Hampshire last night. The debate centers on why the polls were so wrong. David Kuo and Andrew Sullivan (among others) suggested that it might be the so-called Bradley Effect in which white support for black candidates is lower
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Ron Paul: Worse than nutty
Sadly, it turns out that Ron Paul’s conspiracy-minded direct mail is only the tip of the iceberg. TNR’s Jamie Kirchick dug up a series of newsletters published under Paul’s name since the mid-1970s that were much, much worse: [W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published
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GOP health care spin continues
Amidst the focus on the intra-party battles in the presidential race, pundits and reporters have given little scrutiny to the candidates’ cheap shots at the other party, which is a bad precedent for the fall campaign. These sorts of falsehoods shouldn’t be allowed to become accepted and no longer “news” (like the claim that tax
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Misogyny v. racism in the Democratic race
Dave Roberts of Grist has written an email to Ezra Klein that perfectly captures my feelings about gender and racial dynamics of the Democratic race: I’ll grant upfront that my thoughts on misogyny and racism in the campaign are somewhat fraught, since as your run-of-the-mill privileged white dude, I hardly have the most direct window
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Obama’s post-Iowa bounce
Charles Franklin’s updated aggregate polling estimates show a significant Obama bounce in New Hampshire — it’s real: Given the positive press he’ll get out of this win and his increasingly likely victory in South Carolina, it’s getting harder to see how she stops him, even if she does win the Nevada caucus. The futures markets
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Andy Rooney embarrasses himself
Dear CBS, Who allowed Andy Rooney’s offensive rant about how the presidential contenders’ names aren’t presidential (i.e. WASPy) enough on the air? He’s been a joke for years but this one really crosses the line. Yours, Brendan Nyhan
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Howard Dean’s lack of restraint
I finally read Matt Bai’s The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics over the break. I’ll have more to say about it soon, but my favorite anecdote has to be this illustration from 2005 (which I missed) of how Howard Dean often fails to restrain himself verbally: The other main part
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The strange premise of Big Think
I don’t understand the premise behind the new site Big Think, which is profiled in today’s New York Times. The article calls it “a YouTube for ideas” and says the business model is to “attract enough viewers, then sell advertising,” but why would we expect a wonky general interest video site to ever become large